The yield of any particular field is the result of many complex variables, such as weather, soil conditions, water, etc. The farmer also has a number of elements under her or his control, such as the number of seeds to use, the amount of fertilizer to distribute onto the field, and the like. The issue for growers is, however, knowing how much of each of these distributed commodities to place on each field.
Growers can obtain planting recommendations based on mathematical models. These models can take into account things such as timing (e.g., season or date) of planting, quantity of seeds, etc. Farmers and other agricultural operations may, however, have preferences on how much of each type of distributed commodity to use. These preferences could be, for example, built up over years of planting on the fields in question. These preferences can include things like the highest and lowest amount of a distributed commodity (e.g., number of seeds, amount of nitrogen or other fertilizer, etc.) for a field. Further, this amount could be different from field to field. An issue with current agricultural practice and systems, however, is that these preferences (or “tolerances”) are not taken into account. Further, the grower may have multiple sources of recommendations (e.g., from mathematical models). Another issue with current agricultural systems is that these multiple sources of recommendations stand alone and therefore cannot be used to give the farmer a joint recommendation.
The techniques herein address these issues.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.